This electrifying After Dark event featured Austin Richards, Ph.D.—aka, Dr. MegaVolt®—jousting with 14-foot electrical arcs from his high-voltage Tesla coil on the evening of Thursday, November 5, 2009. This wonderful performance contributed to the celebration of the Exploratorium’s 40th Anniversary.

Is water ice present or absent in a crater near the moon's south pole? NASA’s Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer. Join Exploratorium staff for a special Webcast featuring live coverage of LCROSS crashing into the moon! Our team will be broadcasting live from the 36" Refractor Telescope at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, where we’ll watch the impact and investigate how this intentional crash could reveal the existence of water ice.

Senior Staff Scientist Thomas Humphrey invents a simple experiment to see if the Giant Mirror is spherical or parabolic, and then to see if it's perfectly spherical. By placing a Styrofoam ball at the center of curvature, he's able to prove that the mirror is out of pure sphericity by about one-quarter of one degree.

Dr. Laura Peticolas is a physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Physics Research group. She studies the Aurora to learn more about the Earth and the workings of our Solar System. She's currently working with NASA's Mars data to understand why the Martian aurora looks the way it does. In this podcast she discusses her research, her inspiration and how and why scientists sonify data.

Astrophysicist Paul Coleman and expert ocean navigator Kalepa Baybayan visited the Exploratorium as advisors to our Polynesian Navigation project—a large-scale Web resource (launching April 2010) that will feature the astounding navigation practices of the Pacific Islanders, who were expertly navigating the Pacific thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.
Paul Coleman works at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, where he concentrates on the large-scale structure of the universe. Kalepa Baybayan is an expert navigator who mentors Hawaiian youth in native navigation practices. Both men are native Hawaiians. We spoke with them about traditional navigation practices, the balance between science and spirituality from a native perspective, and the benefits of being grounded in one’s culture.

Webcasts made possible through the generosity of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Jim Clark Endowment for Internet Education, the McBean Family Foundation.

Bandwidth and infrastructure support for connectivity to the California Research and Education Network and to other Internet2-connected networks provided by the Corporation for Educational Networks Initiatives in California (CENIC).